All eyes now on Karnataka governor Vajubhai Vala as the BJP veteran takes his time

The 80-year-old is best known for vacating his Rajkot seat in 2002, when Narendra Modi needed to win an election after the party made him the Gujarat CM.

Vajubhai Vala had always kept BJP’s interest ahead of his own when he was an active party man. Now, as the Karnataka governor he has to decide between the party he once represented and the Congress-JDS combine as both sides seek to form the next government after the state elected a hung assembly.

Vala, who represented the Rajkot West constituency in the Gujarat assembly for a record seven times, had been the state BJP president, assembly Speaker and a Cabinet minister holding crucial portfolios.

But the 80-year-old is best known for vacating his Rajkot seat in 2002, when Narendra Modi needed to win an election after the party made him the Gujarat CM.

“He served as the BJP president in the state three times when the party was facing rebellion, then making way for others whenever it was demanded of him. He vacated his seat that he held since 1985 for Narendrabhai. It has always been party first for him,” said a BJP leader.

“Vajubhai listens to everyone, he will joke with everyone but he will do what he wants,” said another senior BJP leader from Gujarat who has known Vala for long. Vala, he added, was a straight forward person who was used to working under pressure.

With roots thick in RSS, Vala joined the Jan Sangh in 1971. Known as the ‘Paniwala Mayor’ (water mayor), mainly because he arranged for his city of Rajkot to get water brought in by trains, Vala was Modi’s trusted finance minister for nine years in Gujarat and among the first to be rewarded with the governor’s post when the Modi government took charge at the Centre in 2014.

A Gujarat BJP veteran said Vala would likely see JDS’ HD Deve Gowda with suspicion because of an incident in 1996 when Gowda was the PM and Vala the Gujarat BJP chief.

“The Centre’s decision in September 1996 to place the Gujarat assembly in a state of suspended animation, following unprecedented violence in the House a day earlier when the Suresh Mehta-led BJP government won the trust vote, raised several questions on the actions of governor KP Singh and PM Gowda who was watching it all happen. It was an unfair decision. We had to parade all our MLAs to prove our position,” the leader said.

Ex-Gujarat CM Shankersinh Vaghela remembers that it was Vala who had slapped a stern oneline show-cause notice on him a day before he was expelled by BJP.

"Vajubhai is a witty, simple,fair and obedient man … By obedient I mean, to the RSS. He is a good man, no doubt and a good advocate," Vaghela said.